Steve Todd of Campbell River, British Columbia, a lifelong student of Beaver history, contributed many anecdotes from his extensive collection of Beaver lore. Among the West Coast pilots who told me their adventure stories covering fifty years of flying the Beaver were Tom Baxter, proprietor of Baxter Air of Nanaimo, B.C.; Lee Frankham of Campbell River; Larry Langford of Vancouver Island Air, Campbell River; Maurie Mercer of Finning Tractor, Vancouver; Bill Pennings, chief pilot of Harbour Air, Vancouver; Jack Schofield of Victoria, editor of West Coast Aviator and founder off Orca Air; and Gary Richards of Tofino Air Lines.
Special thanks to Ipaul Stenner, an Air Canada pilot who twice demonstrated his Beaver for me. Former flying-doctor pilot Joe Harvey of Perth, Australia, and the staff of the Royal New Zealand Air Force Museum at Wigram (especially Sgt. Cath Rowland) led me to accounts of the Beaver’s career Down Under.
Colin Fisher and Anita Paalanen of the de Havilland Regional Aircraft Division of Bombardier have been supportive from this project’s beginnings. And no writer about airplanes could have a better friend and mentor than Peter M. Bowers, who made his usual contribution to both the visual and written sides of this book.
Russ Bannock, Fred Hotson and Dick Hiscocks read the manuscript and eliminated countless mistakes. Robin Brass, who has edited many important works of Canadian aviation history, brought his unique insights and care to this project. Those errors of fact and judgement that remain despite the best efforts of these gentlemen are my responsibility alone. —SEAN ROSSITER
Preface Beavers return to Dick Hiscock’s watery backyard
Facing page: De Havilland Canada Heaven at Kenmore Air Harbor’s dock on Lake Washington, near Seattle. Kenmore has bean rebuilding and chartering Beavers and Otters for more than 30 years, and pioneered many now-tommon Improvements. GREGG MUNRO, KIN MORE AIR HARBOR
Our young American pilot stepped out of the freshly restored, pristine white Lake Union Air de Havilland Beaver onto the dock behind the Bayshore Hotel on Vancouver’s Coal Harbour waterfront. He could not have Keen more than twenty-five, h was all too obvious that he would have been very young in 1967, when he last Beaver was assembled. You like your pilot to be older than the aircraft if at all possible.
“Gotta treat this airplane with respect,” he said, reaching up to steady himself by grubbing the wing bracing strut. “It’s at least ten years older than I am.”
Respect it? He worshipped it. He was still briefing me after the half-hour Right as he helped me and the three other passengers out onto the dock at the company terminal on Lake Union in downtown Seattle. What an honour it was to fly a de Havilland Beaver, the greatest bush plane ever, he said. Did I know that the Beaver was named the year before as one of the ten outstanding Canadian engineering achievements of the past century?
Well, no. I didn’t.
He went on. Did I know we were just past the fortieth anniversary of the Beaver’s first flight on August 16, 1947? And that it is powered by an engine, the Pratt & Whitney Wasp Junior, that could become the first aero engine still in scheduled use a hundred years after it was designed?
We took off that summer day in 1988 with a lot of noise but no fuss of any other kind. Floatplanes are known for taking forever to get off the water, which is not the airplane’s natural element. Mounties who flew the Norseman, Canada’s first purpose-built bush plane, used to say its takeoff on floats was obscured by the curvature of the earth.
The impression that remains from our takeoff in the Beaver is of being in some cartoon airplane that stuck its nose up, gathered itself by collapsing back on its tail and floats, straightened itself out and leaped into the air.
If the takeoff was not sufficiently spectacular, the landing certainly was. The Beaver practically stopped in the air as it crossed over the Aurora Bridge, one of the stratospheric iron-age engineering wonders that connect Seattle’s seven hills high above intervening bodies of water. The airbrake effect of the flaps as our floats barely cleared the bridge’s streetlights was palpable and caused a faint ripple of alarm among the four passengers. We exchanged brief glances. But the Beaver was fully under control. This kid and his old airplane could fly. We alighted on Lake Union like some mallard skidding, straight-legged and leaning back, along the surface of a pond. Only images from animation describe the Beaver’s takeoff and landing performance.
So it was that, as so often happens with noteworthy Canadian achievements, it took an American to describe and showcase the Beaver to someone who ought to have known about it all along. Canada is such a strange place, so eager to dwell on its failures. There are, by my count, six books on the Avro CF-105 fighter-interceptor, of which six prototypes were made. One of these books is actually entitled Shutting Down the National Dream.
And yet this is the first lengthy account of the most successful Canadian airplane design ever, a design the merits of which Americans were among the first to recognize. The American armed forces bought more than one-half of the 1,631 Wasp Junior-powered Beavers built, and their requirements resulted in significant improvements in the basic airplane. It was the first foreign aircraft ever ordered in peacetime by both the U.S. Air Force and Army.
The de Havilland team had wondered whether to begin Beaver production three years before the Americans ordered it, when the market was still glutted with war-surplus planes. Instead, de Havilland Canada managing director Phil Garratt put aside the Beaver design studies to produce a military training aircraft, the DHC-I Chipmunk.
Building the first: twenty Beavers was considered a “million-dollar gamble,” as the company advertised it. They were right about that. The Royal Canadian Air Force bought none. Eventually, though, Beavers were sold to sixty-five countries, making this tough, hard-working little airplane one of Canada’s greatest export successes after lumber. Half-a-dozen land features in Antarctica are named for the Beaver, from which they were first spotted.
Only now that many of those Beavers sold abroad are returning to Canada, often as corroded hulks, and mostly in the region where they have yet to be replaced as reliable everyday transportation—along the rugged Washington-British Columbia-Alaska coastline—is the Beaver beginning to be fully appreciated as the engineering masterpiece it has been for nearly fifty years. As these hulks are returned to airworthiness, certified to carry twice the load they were originally designed to handle, we can see the Beaver’s unique place in the annals of aviation. No other aircraft in history was flying in greater numbers as it approached its fiftieth birthday than we re flying ten years before, when I flew from Vancouver to Lake Union and back. The Beaver has simply never been replaced. Only a Beaver can replace a Beaver.
Aside from my own revelation about the de Havilland Beaver from a young American whose name I had not the wit to ask, that same weekend happened to be fraught with weighty Canadian-American implications. I returned to Vancouver to see newspapers headlining the fact that the highest scorer in National Hockey League history, Wayne Gretzky, then the country’s greatest sporting treasure, had been sold to the Los Angeles Kings, setting off one of those paroxysms of self-examination that make up of much of Canada’s national discourse.
R.D. “Dick” Hiscocks, the aerodynamicist who shaped the Beaver, happens to live on the other side of Vancouver’s Stanley Park from the Bayshore. From his apartment he often hears Beavers revving up for takeoff. They can be distinguished from other piston-engined aircraft by the unbelievably loud Rrrr-aapp sound made by the Wasp Junior’s two-blade propeller, whose tips at full power approach the speed of sound.